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Thursday, July 23, 2015

Presentation at the 2015 ACI Spring Convention

I recently gave a presentation at the ACI Spring Convention about the research I carried out during my stay in Delft in Summer 2014, and deep into 2015 at distance.

The abstract for the presentation is as follows:

In August 2014, the Ruytenschildt Bridge in the Friesland province in the Netherlands was tested until failure. This bridge is a reinforced concrete solid slab bridge. One of the goals of testing the Ruytenschildt bridge to failure, is to study the failure mode of the bridge (shear failure or failure in bending?) and to compare the capacity of the full bridge structure to the predicted results, to have an idea of the residual strength of existing bridges.

The methods used for this study are on one hand experimental (testing of the bridge to failure in two of its five spans) and on the other hand analytical. The analytical work involved predicting the bending moment capacity of the bridge as well as the beam shear and punching shear capacity. Additional effort is geared towards studying the effect of the skew of the bridge, as well as estimating the probability that the bridge will fail in bending before shear. In both spans, the bridge failed in flexure. According to the analytical predictions, the first span would fail in flexure and the second could fail in either shear or flexure. The total capacity during the experiment was significantly higher than predicted – during the first test on the first span, not enough load was available to reach full failure. The analysis of the results is still in progress.